Posts Tagged “rants”

In the last batch of books I ordered from The Book Depository I had “97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know”. It was a thin book and one of the first to arrive, so I figured it was a good one to start. The book is a collection of 2-page articles about project management. It has 198 pages, but I just read until around page 70, then “speed-read” the rest because I was so disappointed that I just wanted to get it over with. This has been the most disappointing book I’ve read in many years, and I rarely stop reading books even if I don’t like them that much (especially if they are as short as this one).

But I hate not trying to be constructive, and just saying that it was disappointing for me won’t tell you much about the possibility of it being disappointing for you, so here we go:

The choice of articles seemed “random”: clearly some of the authors had very good things to share, but many others didn’t sound that experienced or having so much interesting to say. I could imagine myself writing some of those articles.

Many articles read like they want to give “general” advice, but extrapolating from circumstances that I may never have (like making a rule out of a “this happened to me once” kind of experience).

I didn’t find it “inspiring” at all, if I wasn’t a project manager already I would not want to become one. The idea of working as a project manager felt dry, boring, and too focused on processes.

Many articles feel written for someone that doesn’t have any project management experience whatsoever. That’s cool, but it’s useless for me and should have been clearer in the book I think.

Many other articles seem written for project managers from other industries (or even simply “managers”) that are going to start managing a software project. That is not only plain useless to me, it also bores me to death. Seriously, WTF is with the definitions of super basic concepts? If you don’t know what an “iteration” or a “hack” is and you won’t check yourself out of curiosity you shouldn’t be allowed to manage a software project. Period.

Many articles felt too “corporate” to me, there was too much jargon and too many references to job titles, methodologies and contractors instead of really essential stuff based on experience.

Reading some of the more or less interesting stuff, I couldn’t help thinking that those things would be obvious for someone who has been working as a software developer for years and wants to become a project manager because she finds it interesting.

Other articles were interesting, but lacked depth to make them really useful.

Don’t get me wrong, there are useful articles, but the book as a whole doesn’t feel that useful. Certainly not worth the time reading the whole thing.

And finally, something that kept popping in my head, even if the comparison is unfair (it’s a different kind of book), is that this book is in many respects the opposite of the things I loved about Making Things Happen (an excellent book that you should read if you have any interest in project management). Oh well.

Over the past few weeks I’ve become increasingly concerned about Facebook. I even considered deleting my account (idea I haven’t really discarded), but the amount of people I’m going to lose contact with is making me hesitate.

So, why the concern? I’m glad you asked. You can get a rough idea by reading these articles:

After reading all that, for me it’s pretty clear that Facebook doesn’t give a flying fuck about your privacy. Actually, even Zuckerberg presumably said so. That is for me the big issue: the exact problems we might have now, the current workarounds, the fact that you now have this or that option to counter some of the automatic changes by Facebook… is all irrelevant. To elaborate a bit:

Facebook started as a much more “private” space in which you only shared information with your friends. This has radically changed, and I somehow find it disrespectful toward their users. We’re not talking about evolution here, but of pretty big “philosophical” changes. This is not what I signed up for.

It has happened several times that Facebook has changed your privacy settings on updates. Some of those changes can’t even be countered, or it’s fairly hard to do so. That pisses me off.

The “Facebook messing with your privacy settings” will no doubt happen again. So now, instead of using/enjoying the service, I have to fight against it.

So the current situation is that I know that Facebook can, at any moment, change something I don’t want it to, and I’ll have to read a bunch of articles to understand the threat and counter it. I don’t want to review my privacy settings from time to time “just in case”. I don’t want to wonder if my data is available to more people I’d like it to. I don’t see the point in using a service that is designed to do the opposite of what I want. And that makes me wonder why do I bother at all. Or if I want to support a company or service that behaves like that.

As I had mentioned several times, I had beenfrustratedwithTypo. Several bugs or misfeatures that really annoyed me, upgrades that had frustrated me, and sometimes the feeling that more or less visible things were broken from time to time in new releases. And while the upgrade problems were mostly because of the need to upgrade Ruby gems, still it was something that was inevitable with Typo apparently, so sticking with Typo meant having to deal with Rubygems, which as you may know I hate.

So, after the last upgrade and the frustrations that came with it, I decided to ask around for good blogging software. The main contenders I had in mind were Wordpress and Movable Type. Most of the people who replied talked wonders about Wordpress, but I decided to try both. Wordpress’ installation was ridiculously easy (I’m talking about installing my own copy, not opening a blog in wordpress.com obviously) and I had a working blog pretty quickly. Also, at least the first impression of the UI is that it’s very slick and easy to use. It shows maturity. Movable Type was easy enough to install, although I did have some problems (mostly due to my own stupidity, but still). The first impression was that Movable Type was much “heavier” and maybe a bit too much for a single, personal blog. So I decided to go for Wordpress, which was the one that I had been recommended by most people anyway.

So, the first thing I had to do was exporting the content from Typo’s HCoder so I could import into Wordpress. I quickly found some script for Typo that would export in Wordpress’ format, for easy import. It worked very well, although I did a problem with the tags: they were treated as normal categories, so I ended up with many categories and no tags (and a huge, horrible, impossible to navigate sidebar with dozens of categories). I started to look around, and I couldn’t find a spec for the wxr format. Maybe I was naive thinking that there would be one, but hey. In any case, eventually I figured out that I had to change the:

<category>rants</category>

to

<category domain="tag">rants</category>

for the tags. The categories had to stay as they were, but luckily for me, all uppercase names were categories, and all lowercase names were tags, so I could do the trick with vim with:

:%s/<category>\([a-z]\)/<category domain="tag">\1/

After that, I could import back all the content, but then I had the next hurdle: the style of the blog. I didn’t mind if the design wasn’t exactly the same, but I was used to the old one and didn’t want to change it too much, so I used the excellent Opera Dragonfly to inspect the styles of the old blog, and I slowly copied the most interesting values (colours and font sizes mostly) to the equivalent CSS classes in the Wordpress theme. I’m happy with the result, so I think I’ll leave it as it is for now.

Last, but not least, I wanted to try to keep the old URLs working. I did two things for this:

I added some URL rewrites to keep Typo’s feed URLs working. However, the Atom ones also redirect to the RSS ones, I wonder if that’ll be a problem.

I changed the default permalink settings in Wordpress so they matched what I had in Typo. Hopefully almost all blog posts will actually keep the URL and the migration to Wordpress won’t be very traumatic. You tell me if I’ve broken anything ;-)

One thing that I don’t like about Wordpress’ blog editor is that apparently it doesn’t allow you to write in some Wiki-like syntax, like Markdown or Textile. I know Movable Type does have it, but several other things made me stick with Wordpress and I’m happy overall. At least for now ;-)

I have upgraded to Typo 5.4.1. Partly because of security issues, partly because of new features and improvements.
It took me a while, mostly because of stupid Ruby deployment nonsense that makes me even more tired of Ruby as a language for production usage, than I already was. Oh well.
One of the most important new features for me in this release was the article preview, which doesn't seem to work. Or maybe it does, but then support for writing blog posts in Textile seems like it was dropped. Suggestions for other blogging platforms that aren't a pain to upgrade because of the language dependencies, supports writing in some wiki-like syntax (e.g. Textile or Markdown) and generally works well are _very_ welcome.
It seems that everything is in place and working now, but if you see anything misbehaving, please give me a shout and I'll try to fix.

Phew! It has been a long time since I wrote. More than once already, hmmm….

I went to the movies to see Watchmen. I don’t want to spoil, but I think it was a very, very good adaptation of the comic book. Actually, I think it’s the best comic adaptation I have ever seen. And I don’t think Watchmen was particularly easy to get right. And I had just finished reading the comic for the second time just before watching the movie. And yet, I was impressed. The adaptation was really close to the book, and very, very good.

I admit I didn’t have huge expectations: after 300 (amazing book, silly-although-fun action movie), the “from the visionary director of 300” in the Watchmen trailer didn’t sound particularly encouraging. But I just love Watchmen-the-comic, so I figured it’d probably be fun to watch. And boy was I right. Not only fun, but very interesting, and even moving at moments (my favourite part of the movie is the story of Jon Osterman).

There are a couple of things I didn’t like (not spoilers, don’t worry!):

The fights were a bit too superhero-ish (people “flying” around and such), which made it look a bit silly.

It was a bit too crude and bloody.

Adrian Veidt didn’t have the massive charisma from the comic. He felt more like an arrogant asshole.

Before actually watching the film, though, there were the typical commercials. One of them really upset me, and I thought it was worth a mention. The commercial showed three young lads waiting in a queue, about to enter the U.S. Someone was checking their passports and whatever. The first of them enters and waves at the other two, happy. The second one enters and looks at the last one. The person checking the passports takes a while with the last one… and finally says some bullshit like:

>
> I'm sorry sir, I can't let you in
>
>

The first two look at him, confused, looking for an explanation, and the unlucky one looks back with a sad face, like regretting something. Then, the grand finale: some stupid text explains that he couldn’t enter because he had done something horrible, namely…. graffiti.

Give. me. a. fucking. break. I’m tired of all that biased bullshit. It’s not like Oslo has big problems or anything, but seriously: even fixing the crappy pavement around Grünnerløkka is like several orders of magnitude more important than the “graffiti problem”. Seriosly, politicians, get a life and do something useful.

I had this pearl saved since I was on vacation in Gran Canaria. It’s a perfect example of a shoddy piece of work when you do things quick & dirty, without wanting to spend money or time to do things properly. I obviously don’t know the circumstances of the company that made this, or its employees, but I can imagine.

A bit of context: I was in a very touristic part of the island, and some person handed me a brochure (in English) with information about excursions around different parts of Gran Canaria. I thought it would be a good idea to keep it around, to get ideas about which parts we could see in the next days. However, when we arrived at the hotel and started reading it, we realised how horrible it was. So horrible that we spent some time reading through it, half laughing, half outraged, and I kept it to write about it ;-)

First impression: crappy design and font faces; lots of information stuffed together without order or harmony; horrible wording (bad high-school student level); different writing style in each text; typos, Spanish-like expression, almost complete lack of accents in the Spanish names. Obviously English is not my mother tongue, and I don’t claim to not make mistakes, but the general quality of this is really bad. Some highlights:

From the first excursion, “Grand Tour”: “We drive now along de (sic) west-coast up to Agaete, do you know what Dedo de Dios means?? The gide (sic) will explain you everything about it. In Agaete we have some time for a small lunch, today we go for fish (meat is possibel (sic))” and “This is a verry (sic) nice trip with lots of magistic (sic) views of al (sic) types of rockformations (sic)”.

The second excursion, “Undiscover Gran Canaria” (emphasis mine), ends with: “At the end of the day, the couch (sic) will take you back to your hotel”.

From the third one, “Las Palmas ‘HighLights’”: “[…] the Museum ‘Casa Colon’ (christof.columbus)”. WTF is that, his GMail address? Apart from the fact that that’s not the English spelling for Christopher Columbus.

The fourth one is about a municipality called “Teror”. For some reason, they decided to always uppercase it, which leads to this expression jumping and screaming for attention: “Market of TEROR” (also bold in the original), so easy to misread as “Market of TERROR”, which sounds… weird.

The fifth one, “The Cavehouses (sic) of Guayadaque”, also has interesting stuff: “Our last stop will be in the old town of Agüimes, […]. Now we turn back, direction Aguimes (sic) […]”, “[…] where we have the posibility (sic) for a nice lunch in a typical canarian (sic) restaurant ( entrance musem opcional (sic))” and “Its (sic) now time to go back, the beautiful ravain (sic???) of tirajana (sic), with a stop in the old village Fataga, enjoy the amazing views, and please…don’t forget your camara (sic)”.

The sixth has some minor issues, but the seventh (“Ferry/market Mogan (sic) 2 in 1 excursion”) is short and just great so here it goes: “From Playa del Inglés we travel too (sic) the port of Arguineguin (sic) where we take the ferry too (sic) the port of Mogan (sic), better known as little vinice (sic), here you will visit an authentic tradicional (sic) street market”.

Fast-forward to the eleventh (“Sioux City”), which starts strong: “It is time to go back to your childhood and play cowboys and Indians! Yes I am talking about the famous Sioux City”. Gotta love the lack of commas. Then it goes: “You will witness a bank robbery in the wild wild west, with horses, guns, knifes (sic) whips and of course those dancing gids (sic??? wtf?). Whilst feasting on a western buffet and drinking free all night. It’s a night for all the family… So go on ride em Cowboy”. I love the super fancy “whilst” mixed with the lack of commas.

Twelveth sets a new standard, and writes everything IN CAPS… and of course almost without commas: “COME AND ENJOY WITH US A GREAT DAY, KNOWING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES OF OUR ISLAND […]” (“KNOWING” for “getting to know” of “discovering”), “ENJOY THIS ADVENTURE AND WE WILL TELL YOU ALL ABOUT THE HISTORY AND CULTURE AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ADMIRE THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY” (“COUNTRY” for “countryside”, I think) and “DO NOT FORGET YOUR SWIMSUIT FOR OUR REFRESHING SWIM IN ONE OF OUR LAKES”. I’m not completely sure about the English terms, but I think in Gran Canaria we only have dams, not lakes.

There is more crap, but I’m tired of writing and you got the idea already. I think the world needs more QA ;-)

After a couple of (unrelated) recent events, I remembered that some/most people use some desktop “word processor” for writing and maintaining documentation. After years of working with Wikis for virtually all documentation, I have to say that I don’t understand why people still use those dinosaurs. Using a word processor for documentation feels so nineties.

When working in technical teams, I think the advantages of the Wikis are amazing:

You know you’re always reading/modifying the latest version. Uploading to a central server or a shared folder, although theoretically possible (and I’m sure some people do), I don’t think it works as well.

You can link all content to any other content (and if you keep all your documentation in the same Wiki, you can link to other project documentation or general company/team guidelines or conventions, for example).

You can keep bits of documentation that don’t fit in a standalone “document”, like collections of small tips, lists of things to take into account when you do this or that, checklists, configuration/code snippets and examples, journals, etc. And of course link all that to any other part of the documentation, as stated above.

You think “globally”, in terms of the content, not in terms of “documents” that are (usually artificially) independent from each other. Also, it’s mentally cheaper to browse through wiki pages than it is to browse word processor documents, so the documentation is more visible and more used.

You focus on content, not on formatting or the way things are presented. It’s also easier to keep the same consistent look and feel for all your documentation, if you wanted to change it.

As you don’t have “documents”, just “documentation”, people feel free to edit and update it whenever is necessary, instead of feeling the need to ask the “author” of each document.

You don’t need any special program that might not be available in all platforms, or at least not interpret the document in exactly the same way. It’s also easier to access it from other computers.

Documents don’t get lost or become obsolete because of the format.

You usually get revision control for free (revision control that makes it trivial to see the whole change history for the documentation, review which exact changes some person has made in a given moment, etc). And if you’re using a Wiki that doesn’t support version control, you should use a different Wiki ;-)

Of course, I’m not saying Wikis are the perfect solution, let alone independently of the team, company, project and context you’re using them in, but I think in general they are quite superior as technical documentation repository for a software development team.

I have always thought that systems should be something integrated. Each “system” has its own conventions, cultural values, etc. and I think you have to respect that. I believe in the Debian way (adapting programs to an integrated system, not just creating a large collection of packages that are identical to the upstream versions), I like to adapt my style of programming to the language (indentation conventions, identifiers, tools for building and testing, etc.), I prefer cross-platform applications that look and feel like each platform they run on, etc.

In the same way, I feel that the mere idea of having a programming-language-dependent packaging system is a broken idea. I know it has advantages, and I know that being specific to the language, some things work better or are more flexible, but I just don’t believe in that idea. Why should I use a different packaging system for certain things just because they’re written in Ruby? Why do I, as a user of those programs/modules, even have to know that there’s some Ruby-specific packaging system, that doesn’t integrate at all with my system’s packaging system, and mixing both leads to a mess?

Not only that, but Rubygems in particular is quite hostile to repackaging into a platform-specific packaging system. A lot of people only provide the gems for their software, which are harder to work with than “normal” tarballs. They also use their own conventions for directories, that break the FHS (for example) and basically only make sense in the context of Rubygems. In that sense, CPAN is much better (although I think using it for application deployment is a very bad idea, but that’s a different matter), because at least it installs everything in sane directories, it doesn’t change Perl in any way, and it’s not a special format, just a repository of easy-to-install, easy-to-work-with, easy-to-hack, easy-to-repackage “distributions”.

Today I was playing with GnuPG, trying to add a couple of public keys to an “external” keyring (some random file, not my own keyring). Why? you ask. Well, I was preparing some Debian package containing GPG keys for APT repository signing (like debian-archive-keyring and such).

The point is, I was really confused for quite a bit because, after reading the gpg manpage, I was trying things like:

gpg –no-default-keyring –keyring keys.gpg –import … # Wrong!

But that wouldn’t add anything to the keys.gpg, which I swear I had in the current directory. After a lot of wondering, I realised that gpg interprets paths for keyrings as relative to… ~/.gnupg, not the current directory. I guess it’s because of security reasons, but I find it really confusing.

The lesson learned, always use --keyring ./keys.gpg or, better, never use keys.gpg as filename for external keyrings, but something more explicit and “non-standard” like my-archive-keyring.gpg or whatever.

The other day I was talking about upgrading Typo. The update itself went well, true, and the site was up and running without too much downtime, but then I started using it again… and I have noticed two things so far (both about writing posts) that I really dislike:

First, the good old editor is not there anymore: the Typo editor used to be really good, because on the left hand side you had a very reliable and easy to use textarea with Wiki syntax (you can choose which exact syntax you want), and on the right hand side you had a “live preview” of your post, automatically updated with Ajax, that showed you how the post was going to look like. Well, that’s gone. Now there are two options: some retarded WYSIWYG box, that I tried to use and failed, and some good old textarea… without the damn live preview. That sucks big time, because there is no other preview (that I have seen: please enlighten me if there is indeed one), so I just blindly write things in a Wiki format, and hope that it’s going to look OK when I press “Publish”.

Second, I was playing with the Wiki format for the articles, and I changed it to “Markdown” (I always mix “Textile” with “Markdown”, and never remember which is which; the one I prefer is Textile). After I hit “Save”, not only the next article was parsed in Markdown format by default, but every single blog post. It’s like, you select the parser the system is going to use to interpret your whole blog. How retarded is that? Once you have written posts, it doesn’t make sense to change their syntax (unless you do it manually editing the post itself). Clearly the format is a property of each blog post, not of the whole blog installation.

Not everything is bad though: it seems that now you finally have a “Draft” concept, so I can start writing a blog post and just save as a draft, instead of unticking the “Online” property and saving as a normal post. Also, the drafts are saved automatically, so I don’t have to remember to hit “Save” from time to time just in case the browser crashes or I hit something stupid and erase the contents of the post. Yay for that.

In my recent trip to Copenhagen, I recorded a small video of the subway (it’s really cool, because it’s completely automatic, it doesn’t have drivers or anything). I wanted to edit the video to remove people that were reflected on the window, so I wondered if I could do that on Linux. I imagined it wouldn’t be trivial, but it was more frustrating than I thought. Maybe I’m too old for this.

The first thing I tried was looking in APT’s cache for “video editing”. The most promising was kino. I had tried that some time ago a couple of times, and I never made it to work, but I figured I would try again. Unfortunately, same result: I just can’t figure out how to import my videos. Maybe I’m just hitting the wrong button or whatever, but it’s really frustrating.

Second thing was having a look in the internet. I found the (dead and being rewritten?) Cinelerra, as always, and I didn’t feel like installing the old one from source, only to lose my time and not get it to work, so I just ignored it. Maybe they had it in debian-multimedia and wouldn’t have been a tough install after all. Anyway.

Next thing, I found some program called openmovieeditor. This one apparently worked, but I couldn’t figure out how to crop the image (or almost any other thing for that matter).

Next, some neat program written in Python, called pitivi. When I tried to run it though, it just said Error: Icon 'misc' not present in theme on the console and died. I later figured out that I had to install gnome-icon-theme for it to work (yeah, Debian maintainer’s fault). It’s funny, because on the webpage it says that it has some “advanced view” that you can access via the “View” menu… but I couldn’t find it. My menu only had one entry: “Fullscreen”. Great.

Oh, wait, there’s a gimp-gap. I could just import my animation in Gimp, crop the frames, and convert again to video. Easier said than done. I needed some programs that I didn’t have, and I wasn’t sure if they were so easy/quick/clean to install (sure, I could have exported to GIF animation and probably convert to video, I just didn’t want to lose so much color quality in the GIF step). Forget for now. At least I had the images, so if I could just turn them into a movie…

So, I started wondering if, given that I had decided to just crop, and especially now that I had a lot of images that were the frames, maybe I could just use some command line tool or something. So I found this tiny little program, images2mpg. Long story short, after installing some dependencies from source (that gave compilation errors, but luckily I could compile only the binaries I really needed) that program was completely retarded and didn’t even do what I wanted (it wanted at least one second between images, but I didn’t want a slideshow, just a normal movie from the frames). It looks some simple and it’s so buggy. Gah.

So I started wondering if I could just crop with mplayer… Hmmm… after a couple of problems (like documented switches that were not there and other crap), I ended up with this command line:

That was reasonably quick and easy but it was so frustrating after all that lost time.

In any case, I ended up with the video I wanted, so I went to YouTube to upload it. When uploading, I realised that there was some option I had never seen: annotations.

YouTube annotations are really cool. They are like the notes on Flickr, but on a video :-D Actually I kind of wanted to make a note like that on this video, to show the automatic doors on the Metro station, so I was really happy to see that I could actually do it. And the interface is really easy to use and very clear. I really like it! You can see the result here:

EDIT: WTF? The annotations don’t appear on the embedded videos? You’ll have to go to the video page to see them, then…

So, today I was working normally, and suddenly I mispress something… and I can’t switch to other desktops anymore.

First thing I think: maybe some KDE global shortcut manager or whatever went nuts, and redefined my “Switch to Desktop” keys. So I go and check the preferences, and I find that everything is alright.

So I try to redefine the shortcuts again, and I notice that according to KDE, F1 produces XF86Launch0, and the rest of my F-keys just don’t do anything. I panic, think for a moment about changing the shortcuts to Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, etc., discard the idea because sooner or later I’ll need the F-keys anyway… and decide to reboot. But still I can’t use my F-keys.

Totally desperate, I ask on IRC and someone says “F Lock”. And I go “WTF is that?” but look at my keyboard, and see some key that is indeed labelled “F Lock”. I press it and everything goes back to normal.

Then, the person goes on to explain that Microsoft has very retarded keyboards (in particular, I was using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard) that “feature” a key called “F Lock”, that redefines the “F keys” (F1, F2, …) to be some “useful” idiotic retarded shortcuts for Office applications or who knows what. I was also told that apparently some of those keyboards, when they boot, they are by default in “retarded mode” (mine seemed to somehow remember the setting in my last reboot, because it has never done that).